How thousands of pagers were rigged, exploded: Decoded in 3 easy points

Just after 3.30 pm on Tuesday, thousands of pagers used by terrorist outfit Hezbollah exploded almost simultaneously across Lebanon and parts of Syria, resulting in the deaths of at least nine people and injuring over 3,000.
The spectacular attack in which pagers exploded has been attributed to Israel by both Hezbollah and the Lebanese government. Pagers, communication devices from bygone decades, were made to explode in a remote, sophisticated and coordinated manner. Experts also pointed out that the attack exploited vulnerabilities in the supply chain of the pagers that reached Hezbollah five months back.
But how did the primitive device with no GPS, no microphones and cameras, meant to avoid Israeli surveillance, instead, turn out to be a killer device for Hezbollah? Turns out the pager attack in Lebanon signals a combination of physical planting of explosives and a trigger prompting the explosions.
Here are the three broad steps that outline how this attack was likely executed.
The attack is believed to have its origin in supply chain interference, where the pagers were manipulated either during production or in transit.
Hezbollah recently ordered 5,000 pagers from a Taiwan-based manufacturing firm called Gold Apollo. However, the company revealed that those pagers were actually produced by a European company, BAC, using the Gold Apollo brand, somewhere in Europe.
Although Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang initially declined to comment on the location of the European manufacturer, a Reuters report later revealed that BAC, which made the devices under licence, is based in Hungary’s capital Budapest. .
The pagers before getting to Hezbollah members in Lebanon and Syria had fallen into the hands of Israel’s external intelligence agency, Mossad, reported Sky News Arabia, citing sources.Experts told Sky News Arabia that during the shipment stage, a tiny amount of explosive material, likely PETN (Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate), was inserted into the pagers and placed near their batteries by the Israeli spy agency.
Hezbollah switched to pagers from cellphones to avoid being tracked by Israeli intelligence agencies, but didn’t realise that pagers had three of the five components that could be used to weaponise them.
A British Army veteran said a pager has three of the five main components that are needed in an explosive device. The five components are — a container, a battery, a triggering device, a detonator and an explosive charge.
“A pager has three of those already. You would only need to add the detonator and the charge,” the former officer told news agency AFP.
The compromised pagers with explosives were shipped to Lebanon’s Hezbollah almost five months ago, reported Qatar-based Al Jazeera. Until the Tuesday explosions, the newly acquired pagers did not raise any suspicions and were widely used. Hezbollah had purchased almost 5,000 of them.
This level of sophistication in the pager attack showed that the operation was carried out by a highly skilled and resourceful state actor, a distinction associated with the Mossad.
The compromised pagers were then distributed among Hezbollah members, who had ditched cellphones to hoodwink Israeli spy agencies.
Interestingly, the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon lost one eye in the attack when a pager he was carrying exploded on Tuesday afternoon, The New York Times reported. That also exposed the network of Hezbollah, which is an essential part of Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’, that the US and Israel refer to as the ‘Axis of Evil’.
For months, the pagers were used without incident, as the explosives remained hidden and undetected. The period of dormancy proved crucial, as it ensured that the pagers became an integral part of Hezbollah’s communication network among its members and the facilitators in Iran. It was about time that the eventual attack on Tuesday (September 17) was carried out.
On Tuesday afternoon, thousands of pagers simultaneously received a message that remotely detonated the explosives, according to a BBC report. Though it is clear that the explosives were remotely detonated, it hasn’t been confirmed exactly how that was done.
A message, likely an alphanumeric text, triggered the explosives placed in the pagers, causing them to explode almost simultaneously across various cities of Lebanon and parts of Syria.
One of the theories is that the pagers were remotely detonated by raising the temperature of the batteries.
“The pagers were likely implanted with explosives and designed to detonate only upon receiving a specific message,” David Kennedy, a former US National Security Agency intelligence analyst, told CNN.
The Wall Street Journal reported that some Hezbollah members felt their pagers heating up and disposed of them before they exploded.
Pagers usually need AA, AAA or lithium-ion batteries to function that can explode.
However, a British Army munitions expert, speaking anonymously to the BBC, suggested that the pagers were likely packed with between 10 grams and 20 grams of military-grade high explosives.
Lithium batteries that overheat can reach 1,093 degrees Celcius (2,000 degrees Fahrenheit), Richard Meier told The Washington Post. Devices are generally designed to vent this heat, but if they don’t, “the battery can and will explode”, he said.
It is theoretically possible to hack into a pager and trigger its battery to overheat and explode, according to Meier.
So, one of the most sensational attacks in modern warfare involved three steps — of rigging pagers, waiting for them to reach the intended targets, and exploding them remotely. This involved both physically inserting explosives and then detonating them from afar.